Why whole company-support works at Plain

The minute that I joined Plain 3 weeks ago as Founding Marketer, I had one of those serendipitous feelings that I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be. I was welcomed with open arms by our small but mighty team, and thrown into the proverbial deep end of super exciting work.

Plain is the fastest, most powerful support platform for B2B companies, and we believe that great customer support is just as important as product and marketing. We pride ourselves on providing exceptional customer support – ensuring every interaction we have with each customer is valuable, productive, and fast.

At our weekly kickoff meeting every Monday morning, we assign teammates to the support rota for the week. Week 3 marks my first week on our internal support rota, and wow – I don’t think there is a better way to learn the ins and outs of a product than by supporting customers. Every time I respond to a customer, I learn something new. I spot opportunities for how we can speak to our features in a clearer way. And I’m constantly blown away by the stellar product that our team has created.

Why do we do whole-company support?

Whole company support works when a few things collide: it’s easy to do (i.e. doesn’t take people away from their “day jobs”), there are tools in place to make it valuable, and when teammates know the ins and outs of the product.

The rationale behind operating whole-company support comes from our founders, Simon and Matt. Their deeply held belief is that support is the key link to our customer base, and the most important job when working at a startup resonates with the whole team at Plain. We are all responsible for our product, messaging, and appeal to customers – the fastest way to know how we’re performing in these areas is by talking to our customers.

Also – how can we actually build a great product for support if we don’t do support ourselves?

“As companies grow, access to customers becomes more restricted. We want to build a company culture that’s fundamentally opposed to that kind of restriction from the very start. Teammates should be demanding to speak to customers all the time” – Simon Rohrbach, Co-Founder at Plain.

As an aside – if you want to read more about Simon and Matt’s rationale for founding Plain – check out their manifesto.

Where we support our customers

We use 3 key channels to support our customers at Plain: Slack, email, and in-app. Being able to consolidate all of our support channels into one platform means it’s so easy to be consistent in our messaging and response times.

Slack

The majority of our customers use Slack internally anyway, so being able to support them directly in the channel they already use is really helpful in providing fast support. By linking Slack to Plain, we can prioritize requests based on the SLAs of our different customers, identify issues across customer types, and create Linear tickets directly from a Slack request.

Email

Our own email inbox (help@plain.com if you ever need it) is linked to Plain. Some people like to get support the old-fashioned way, and with Plain, we can manage our email support without ever opening our Google Group. Emails are treated the exact same way as Slack and In-App requests, SLAs are attached as normal, and we can be confident that our support is just as good through email as our other channels.

In-App

We built our in-app form to cover 3 key areas: bugs, feedback, and questions. Splitting our in-app requests into 3 buckets allows us to make sure we triage them appropriately when a customer uses the form. If the customer runs into a bug, they can mark it as “urgent” so we know to action it immediately – allowing us to ensure that our customers aren’t blocked on taking key actions with their own customers in Plain. They’re also auto-tagged with the right labels so we don’t need to spend time actually attributing them in Plain.

So, how do we actually do whole-company support at Plain?

At Plain, we’re building our support platform to suit our own needs. We think it’s a good proxy for the needs of  other technical B2B teams in the SaaS space.

Technical and non-technical pairings every week

Every Monday, we assign 2 team members to the support rota for the week. We always make sure to pair technical and non-technical folks together on the rota, ensuring we can address all of the queries that we get each week.

One of the things I really love about our rota is that we never work in silos. I can start discussions with our team in Slack directly from the customer thread in Plain whenever I need help with a support request.

Regular discussion of customer feedback

Whoever is on the rota for the week is responsible for bringing customer issues to the rest of the team in our daily standup – and if it’s a blocking issue or something small we can get out of the way quickly, they’ll either work on a fix themselves or flag it to the team. This enables us to provide incredibly fast resolution times measured in hours – and often even in minutes.

At the end of each week, we review important customer interactions and questions. This allows us to fold bigger work into the weeks ahead, identify patterns, bugs, celebrate successes and pinpoint where we can improve.

Gardening

We recently introduced a weekly gardening session. Friday mornings, our entire team allocates a few hours to pick up small, quick-fire improvements that we’ve either noticed during the week, or things individual teammates feel would benefit the product. We call it gardening because it’s about tending to the product and doing the things that might not be noticeable from a distance, but are just as important.

Why whole-company support works for us

Our whole-company support works for our team, and our customers, for a few key reasons:

Inclusivity from day one

Every new starter at Plain, regardless of their role, participates regularly in the support rota. This ensures that all employees – from the newest to the most seasoned (and yes, this includes the founders) – have direct experience with our customers’ needs and challenges. I truly believe that whole-company support at Plain is what’s allowed us to foster a customer-centric culture from the ground up.

Sharing context

We place a strong emphasis on making important company context available to everyone. This includes things like knowing which customers are onboarding,who has particularly sensitive SLAs, and who is trialing out particular features, so we know what and where to prioritize. It helps us speak to customers in a way that is useful to them: we can be more educational with customers who are onboarding, compared to being more detailed with customers who have been using Plain for a while.

In Plain, we can also see customer data that will have the most impact on facilitating us to answer questions to the best of our ability. We can see all the customer’s previous conversations with us, the plan they’re on, the role the specific customer has within their organization and more – directly in their thread in Plain.

Continuous improvement

Our weekly reviews and gardening sessions are crucial to make sure that we continuously improve our whole-company support. There’s no point in doing whole-company support if it’s not actually impacting your product or creating a feedback loop between support, product, and engineering. Our cycle of feedback and improvement keeps us aligned with our customers’ needs, and maintains our high bar for support.

“Support is where all the rough edges of your product manifest. Everything that is confusing, missing or broken ends up being a support request. Good products are built by teams that are closer to their users” – Matt Vagni, Co-Founder at Plain.

Try Plain today if you’d like to transform your own whole-company support.